Good for Landry
AU on feeling validated after seven years of pining for our dearly departed young shooter.
It’s getting a little hard to know where my own feelings stand on these finals. I went in rooting for the Knicks, to confirm we lost to a true Team of Destiny — and really more to the point, rooting against the Spurs, just ‘coz I still think it’s way too soon for them — but that last win of theirs certainly annoyed the shit out of me. They were getting beat so bad that my Knick fan friends had already given up and pivoted to complaining about the refs and concluding that the league had fixed the series in the Spurs’ favor and so on, when the Knicks just decided oh why not let’s fuck around and get this one too. Then it was just like gravity: by the end of the fourth quarter, there was no mistake they could make that wouldn’t lead to the Spurs just making a worse one and still ultimately giving them the W. I understand every ToD gets one win like that over the course of their run, but the Knicks already got theirs in the last round against Cleveland in Game One. I enjoyed that one. Them getting a second one like this just feels showy, arrogant, unsportsmanlike.
But they got it. Now they’re up 3-1 with all the momentum and every famous person who’s ever lived on their side. They’re going to win the Finals. And if they don’t, I’m fine with jinxing them here, because it would be undeniably hilarious after a win like that to for them to then go on and blow the series in semi-historic fashion. But that’s probably not going to happen. Sometime in the next week, we’ll have to deal with the Knicks being NBA champions for the first time in most of our lifetimes. I’m not sure whether that’s preferable for me to the Spurs and Wemby winning a chip so ahead of schedule — can’t say he or they have endeared themselves any more to me over this stretch either — but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be some degree of annoying.
I am happy for Landry, though.
For all the former Sixers who we feared would end up playing major roles torturing us for one reason or another in these finals — James Harden, Tobias Harris, Jared McCain — I don’t think any of us ever really contemplated Landry Shamet being the Last Relevant Former Sixer Standing. (Not counting Julian Champagnie on the Spurs who I have no real memory of even being a Sixer in the first place.) Hell, it’s still sorta surprising that Landry is currently playing a major role period, anywhere: For most of his near-decade now of bouncing around the NBA, he’s been stuck on the rotational fringes, sporadically earning regular minutes due to injuries or shooting heat but often ceding them back before season’s end. He hadn’t played 1500 minutes in a season since he was rookie, and before this season, hadn’t cracked 1000 since 2022. It seemed like his days of being a real factor were over, if they’d ever totally begun.
But I always believed in sweet Landry. I don’t even totally remember when or why I first fell for him; I probably just saw him hit a three for us once as a rookie and was overcome by how right it felt and decided he would never miss again. I loved him dearly in that first season and was both heartbroken and outraged when he was included in the Tobias Harris trade at the deadline and have mentioned my feelings on the matter at every given opportunity — and some not-really-that-given opportunities — over the past seven years. (And for the record, sentimentality aside, including Landry in that trade still goes down as one of the dumbest and least forgivable moves of the Colangelo years — you’re already trading two first rounders for a dude who’s never even been an all-star, why the fuck do you need to include a prospect in that deal too? I got mad a bunch during Daryl Morey’s tenure about him being so steadfast in not overpaying in trades that we usually ended up just never trading for anyone real; I have to remind myself sometimes that this is what overpaying often looks like.)
I still rooted for Landry as he bounced from team to team, still believed that with the right context and opportunity he could prove himself a real guy. But after a couple seasons of him shooting under 40% in Phoenix — on a team that could’ve desperately used some fringe guys stepping up — and then a year spent lost in the Washington wilderness, it did seem like he might be running out of time. It was great to see him get real minutes on the Knicks last year in their conference finals series against the Pacers, but even that felt more out of desperation than anything, Tom Thibodeau paying the price for running his starters into the ground all regular season and playoffs and finally needing to find out who the hell was left on the end of their bench lest Josh Hart dissolve into a pillar of salt.
But this season under Mike Brown, Shamet is not only a real part of what the Knicks are doing, he’s legitimately one of the reasons they’re doing it. Not so much the last couple games, of course; he went scoreless in that Game Four comeback and was 1-7 the game before it. But that two-game cold stretch drops him down to a frosty 49% from three for the entire postseason, after going 7-12 from deep against us in the second round (unfortunate but we would’ve gotten blasted regardless) and an unthinkable 11-12 against the Cavs in the ECFs. There simply isn’t enough playoffs left for him to crash all the way back to Earth at this point; no matter what happens, he’s still gonna end this season somewhere above the clouds.
Maybe that should make me angry, the way the entire fanbase has a meltdown any time Jared McCain hits a three even when she’s shooting on his own backyard hoop. If it happened at the beginning of the decade it probably would. But now I just feel gratified to have been right (or at least right-ish) about him all along. Plus, Landry took enough years and enough teams to finally find his place that it’s hard to act at this point like there’s any world in which he’s currently doing this on the Sixers. It’s like when Carlos Carrasco finally started pitching like an All-Star about eight years after being included in the Cliff Lee trade; after all that time you might consider doing all the second-guessing work but really you’d rather just go ehhh good for him.
Of course, Tobias Harris was no Cliff Lee, and that trade still makes me furious. But I think that ehhh good for him is generally how I’ll feel for Landry when he wins the title on the Knicks. The validation for him (and for me and my decade of Not Letting This Go) feels satisfying and deserved. We’ve been doing this thing for long enough that just about every relevant NBA team has some guy we let get away for one reason or another, most of whom I feel much less magnanimous about in 2026. For Landry to be that guy on the Knicks feels like a mercy that Sixers fans are rarely granted at this time of year.
Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.